


Escalation

by HappyAnarchist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abusive John Winchester, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Child Abuse, Corporal Punishment, Episode: s01e18 Something Wicked, Episode: s05e16 Dark Side of the Moon, Episode: s06e06 You Can't Handle The Truth, Episode: s09e07 Bad Boys, Gen, Homophobic John Winchester, I can't afford therapy so I project my issues onto fictional characters instead, and how your upbringing can give you messed up ideas about that line, but nothing too explicit, more swearing than cannon, some casual reflections on hookups, that line between corporal punishment and child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28711530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappyAnarchist/pseuds/HappyAnarchist
Summary: Five times Dean’s dad punished him, and one time he turned that punishment on Sam
Relationships: Dean Winchester & John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Other(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42
Collections: Genuary 2021





	Escalation

**Author's Note:**

> So, I’ve never done this before… *drops fic and runs*

The first time Dad hit him - more than the swat or two every kid got when they were being difficult - he must have been six, maybe. Sam was walking, but they hadn’t hit the road for good yet. They had an apartment with a kitchen, though only one bedroom. Dad slept on the pull-out in the living room. He was working at a garage, came home with grease under his nails and smelling like he used to, before. Smelling right again. It was a stab at normal, possibly the last real stab at normal Dad took before giving in to his obsession. 

They’d been eating out of cans and gas stations, but that night Dad had made dinner: frozen chicken strips, canned corn, and frozen broccoli. It was probably the first time since the fire that there’d been a vegetable on Dean’s plate. Dad had started everything at the same time: the chicken was crispy and the corn wrinkled, but all the buds had fallen off the little broccoli trees and made a green sludge in the bottom of the pan, and the stalks were woody and waterlogged. He’d polished off the chicken first, shovelled down the sweet, golden corn - you couldn’t ruin corn, didn’t matter what you did. Then all that was left was the broccoli. 

No matter how long he mushed it around in his mouth, he couldn’t seem to swallow. It was like his throat had closed. Nothing was getting down it, no how. 

Dad spotted the green on his plate, said ‘Eat your vegetables,’ like he wasn’t trying. He knew, on some level, that it wasn’t just about him eating the broccoli. That there was more at stake than him getting his vitamins. He tried to swallow and gagged, the whole of his dinner threatening to come up. 

He wanted to explain about the way his throat had closed, but dad beat him to it.  
“You’re not getting up from that seat til that plate is empty.” 

Well, he was going to die in that seat, then, because there was no way that mass was going down his throat.

Dean sat there chewing the same bite as his dad finished eating, finished feeding Sammy. When Dad turned his back to start washing dishes he moved before he even knew what he was going to do, grabbed the paper towel he’d been given to use as a napkin and horked the clump into it, screwed it up and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans. 

Dad turned around just in time to see the second forkful of broccoli go into Dean’s mouth, and he cracked a smile.

“See? It ain’t so bad.”

And so the rest went, a bite when Dad was looking, spit out when his back was turned, until he could hand over an empty plate. By the time he got through it all it was time to get ready for bed. He couldn’t get the wads out of his pockets while dad was watching him. He’d get rid of the evidence tomorrow. 

Of course he forgot. He was six. So when laundry day rolled around and Dad wanted to know what the hell the mess was in his pockets, he could say honestly that he didn’t know. Dad recognised it first, and his irritation sparked immediately into anger.

“That food cost good money, Dean, money I worked hard for. But it’s the lying I can’t ignore. You didn’t say a word, but you lied to my face.”

Dad stepped towards him and dread swelled, cold and low in his belly. He hadn’t known what was about to happen, but he’d turned to run for the bedroom, to hide under the bed. Dad had grabbed him by the back of the shirt before he’d even made it to the doorway, spun him around and caught him up under his arm, and he felt the hard, rough palm smack down across his backside.

It wasn’t just the pain of it, sudden and sharp and overwhelming, or the horrible trapped feeling of being pinned against his father’s side, unable to get away. It was the fury he could feel thrumming through the man. It was in the tightness of the hand around his hip, holding him in place, in the follow-through of the hand coming down on his ass. He didn’t mean to make a noise, but the blows drove it out of him, a hoarse, breathy scream with each one. Six, quick and hard, and then he was on his feet again, his dad’s hand under his chin, making him meet his eyes through his tears.

Don’t you ever, ever lie to me, you hear?” 

“Y-yes, sir,” he stuttered out.

“Get to your room, now.”

It had felt wrong stretching out on his bed after that - too vulnerable, too exposed - so he’d curled up in the bottom of the closet. 

He couldn’t remember, afterwards, if he’d actually found fingerprints the next day from where his dad had grabbed his arms, where he’d held him still over his knee, or if his memory had made it up, filled in those details later. It was just a spanking. Most kids got them. Dad had told stories about getting them, one swat for each year he was old. It was just knowing that he’d messed up that made it so scary, the fact that it was the first time that made it stick in his memory. It wasn’t a big deal. 

*

The first time Dad hit him with something other than his hand, he was ten. He knew he shouldn’t have left Sammy alone, but he’d been stuck in that damn motel room for three days with nothing but reruns on tv and last year’s schoolbooks to read. He was so bored he felt like he was dying. Sam had been asleep when he slipped out, just across the parking lot, just to play pinball in reception. He was close enough that he’d be able to hear if Dad got back, if anything happened.

He was only going to be gone a few minutes, just to take the edge off. But not being bored felt like drinking water on a hot day, like eating candy where you didn’t realise how much you’d had until the bag was empty and you were about to hurl. The next thing he knew, the guy at the front desk was kicking him out so he could lock up. 

He’d gotten back to see the dark figure leaning over his little brother like in every cartoon nightmare ever. Then Dad came through the door, guns blazing.

He’d tossed them in the car, not even waited for Sam to put his clothes on, dropped them at Pastor Jim’s and went right back out, but of course it was too late by then. The shtriga was gone.

They went to Uncle Bobby’s after that, to figure out their next move, study up on whether Dad still had a shot at ganking the thing that had tried to eat Sam. When they got there Dad hadn’t even gone inside, just said his ‘hellos’ on the front porch, then,

“Give us a minute while you catch up with Sam, will ya, Bobby? Me and Dean need to have us a little chat.” 

He’d given Dean a look, then turned and walked out towards the salvage yard. 

As he followed his father his legs tightened with the need to run, to get out of there as fast as he could, even though Dean knew better. And there was that fear again. Not the bright, clean fear that he’d felt when he’d seen the shtriga, when he’d picked up the shotgun his father had left him. That was a fear that let you do something, that was useful. What he felt now was a weight, a thickness, tight through his shoulders and heavy in his gut, cold and paralysing and completely useless. There was nothing he could do with this fear, and no way to get rid of it apart from letting the scenario play out.

They walked past where the scrap cars would shield them from sight, to where they wouldn’t be heard from the house. Dad came to a standstill and Dean stopped as well, just out of reach even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He knew he should straighten up and look the man in the eye, like a soldier, but he couldn’t pull his shoulders down from around his ears, or drag his eyes up past his father’s chest.

He hadn’t been lying when he told Sam, years later, that Dad never said anything about letting the shtriga get away. Sam didn’t need to know about this part. 

“So. You disobeyed me,” Dad began. “Mind explaining how that happened?” 

“Sir?” It came out thin and quavery, not like a soldier at all. 

“I told you not to leave the room. You left the room. What was so all-fire important that you’d leave your little brother alone when there’s a monster that preys children on the loose?” 

“I…I…It was only gonna be for a second. He was asleep. I thought it would be ok.” It hadn’t seemed like a big deal when he’d done it. It wasn’t like he’d even left the motel. 

“I told you not to leave that room.” Dad’s voice was hard. “I told you not to let him out of your sight. Not even for a second. And it wasn’t just a second, was it?”

Dean’s throat was too tight for him to get an answer out. Not like he had an answer. There wasn’t anything he could say, any reason he could give, that would explain it.

It was a relief, almost, when Dad sighed and stepped towards him. It meant that the talking part was over. But instead of reaching for him, his dad reached for his belt buckle. As he watched his father work the leather through it Dean became acquainted with a whole new level of dread. It flowed icy in his veins and danced in his stomach, shot tingling down all of his nerves. Then the belt was off and doubled in Dad’s hand, but still long and heavy and so much worse than his bare palm. 

“Well? We going to get this over with?” Dad asked. “Or are you going to fight me on this, too?”

His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth.

“If you’re making a habit of disobeying direct orders, you should probably know it’s going to make things a hell of a lot worse.”

It felt like his legs would go out from under him any second, but still he stepped forward just enough to be in reach. He’d never been grateful, before, to have Dad take hold of him the way that had become familiar since that first time, his torso pinned hard to his father’s side, back bent and ass in easy reach. A second longer and he would have been out of there, hightailing it back to the house, hiding in the basement like a scared little kid. 

He was glad, afterwards, that he hadn’t fought Dad on it. Ten swats was bad enough. The sting of the leather lingered a whole lot longer than the sting of the old man’s hand, built a fire in his flesh that made it impossible to focus on anything but the pain of it, wanting it to be over. It had been years since the last time an ass beating made him cry, but damn it if he could keep the tears back.

Uncle Bobby gave him a long, shrewd look when he walked up the porch steps, a few dozen feet in front of his father. He’d kept his eyes on his shoes, face burning with shame. Any idiot could tell by looking at the two of them what had just happened, and Uncle Bobby was no idiot. Worse than the man knowing, though, was the fact that Dean knew he deserved it. Hell, if Uncle Bobby knew what he’d done, he’d take his belt to Dean as well.

It wasn’t until he was older that he found out what kind of history Bobby had with his own old man, realised how he felt about that sort of thing. He didn’t want to put two and two together, the times his dad had whipped him while they were at Bobby’s and the times his dad and Bobby went out back to yell at each other, because he didn’t want to be the reason that they’d stopped going ‘round, but it was mighty hard not to. He might be a dropout, but even he could count to four. 

It wasn’t until he was older still that he thought to question why his father would leave two children alone when there was a monster on the loose that preyed on children. What that shotgun he’d been left had been loaded with, and how likely Dad thought it was that Dean would have to use it. How Dad had known Dean had been gone for more than a few minutes, how he’d been close enough to burst in just before Sam got hurt. 

*

He was fifteen the first time his dad hit him in a way that he couldn’t tell himself was the same as every kid got when they fucked up. At the time he figured he more than deserved it, because he’d failed in his primary task: Look out for Sammy. The two of them had been getting on each other’s last nerve, had wrecked half the cheap furniture and knocked at least one hole in the wall of the roach-infested one-bedroom Dad had left them in with roughhousing that occasionally flirted with manslaughter. They were both chafing for space, for privacy, so when Sam whined that he was old enough to take himself to the library Dean had given in. He’d watched him out the window until he turned the corner, but that was less out of concern for his safety than to be sure that he wouldn’t be turning back for a forgotten book. 

He should have walked him there at least, should have sat watching him as he did whatever the hell it was he got up to when he went to the library. Should have just said no, sat there glaring at each other across the table in what passed for a kitchen until Dad came back. Instead he watched Sam walk out the door with his backpack over one shoulder, watched him out the window just to make sure he wasn’t coming back for anything, then locked himself in the bathroom to get a little private time with the second hand skin mag he’d picked up three towns back, pages worn soft as flannel.

He’d luxuriated in the privacy, figured Sam was liking it himself. The kid would have lived at the library given half a chance. An hour slipped by, then two. It wasn’t until Sam was late for dinner that Dean began to wonder where he was. The kid hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, but he was already eating like a football player. Still, Dean didn’t worry, just shrugged on his jacket and went out into the dusk to find him, grumbling to himself. He’d probably lost track of time. 

It took two circuits of the library building for Dean to start worrying, then a check of the bathroom and a chat with the lady at the desk to start panicking. She recognised the picture of Sam that he showed her, had talked to him a few times about the books he was getting out — nerd — but she said that she hadn’t seen him that day. He hadn’t even dropped off books, she checked the return shelf for him and everything. Somewhere between their apartment and the library, Sam had straight-up vanished.

The town was supposed to be safe, free of supernatural activities, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have any human freaks who’d like to get an almost-twelve-year-old on his own. Over the next three days Dean turned it upside down, dug through every dumpster, searched every out-of-the-way corner, snuck into every tool shed and back room and storage locker, but he didn’t find a single sign of his brother. It was only when he’d run out of places to look that he called Dad, at the hole-in-the-wall motel he was staying in close to his current hunting ground. He left a message with the receptionist, the coded one that meant ‘big trouble, come fast,’ and went right back out to start combing the town again.

When he came stumbling home hours later and saw the Impala parked in front of their apartment he wasn’t sure if he was more scared or relieved. He walked straight in the front door before he could talk himself out of it. Dad was home and, whatever else happened, he’d be able to find Sam. 

He’d figured Dad would tan his hide when he got back. Figured it would be bad, hoped that it might clear some of the guilt he felt. Hoped that it might be the worst thing to came of the whole situation. What he hadn’t expected, when Dad asked ‘Where. Is. Your Brother.” and he’d answered ‘I lost him, Dad. I don’t know,” was the slap. It was lightning fast, a crack of noise from nowhere that left his ears ringing and neck aching, the pain of it sparking on the surface and lingering somewhere deep in the muscles at once. He didn’t realise what had happened until Dad raised his hand again, and he flinched instinctively away.

“What.”

“He’s gone, Dad.” 

The hand closed on the front of his shirt, dragged him in and up on his toes, and again he found himself on the bleeding edge of a new kind of fear. 

That was when the yelling started. 

He’d expected that, too, took hold of the man’s wrist to steady himself, determined to hold on and weather it. His dad was a master at reaming a guy out, could make you feel two inches tall with nothing but a look. Most times, he and Sam agreed, the yelling was worse than what came afterwards. But this was new, having his dad tear him a new one not while standing over him, voice calm and low and venomous, but while he was bristling with anger, one hand holding him in place while the palm of the other provided the punctuation. And he knew enough to be grateful that every slap that fell was just a slap. He’d seen what his father’s fists could do, and he knew that he deserved so much more than this, so much worse than being smacked around a little for letting some monster get his brother. 

When his father’s temper finally subsided he thought that that would be the end of it. That’s how it always worked: he took his licks, then life went on. Dad gave him a bag of frozen peas for his face, and he sat on the edge of his bed and watched him through the eye that still opened as he methodically turned over the apartment. It wasn’t until Dad laid out everything they owned on Sam’s bed — all of their clothes in three piles, the weapons, the first aid kit, the emergency cash — that he realised what he’d missed. The sturdiest of Sam’s clothes, the gun and the knife that he favoured in practice, were missing, as was a respectable quantity of holy water and salt, sterile gauze, antiseptic and painkillers. And cash. The kid had dipped into the emergency cash, not just Dad’s emergency cash but Dean’s as well, that he’d thought neither his dad nor his brother knew he had. 

Sam hadn’t been taken. He’d run away.

Dad didn’t say anything, just stood there with his arms crossed and mouth grimly set, waiting for Dean to work it out for himself, for the realisation to write itself across his face. Then he’d begun unbuckling his belt. 

That was the first time that Dean tried to run since he was six years old. It wasn’t even intentional, his muscles gathering themselves under him and his body springing away in panic at the sound of the buckle being undone. He’d taken his punishment. It was supposed to be over. 

He was faster than Dad, but Dad was between him and the door. This time, he knew for sure the hand on his arm left bruises. The wrench he felt in his shoulder when his dad swung him around, the tearing of muscle fibres, was his fault. He shouldn’t have tried to get away. But he couldn’t make himself calm down, couldn’t make himself stop fighting. The arm was twisted up between his shoulder blades and he hit the bed hard, face-down. A big, rough hand dragged his jeans down, the denim scraping and digging into his skin as it went. The hand on his wrist moved just enough to yank his shirts up, and he felt cold air on his bare skin. His breathing was loud in his ears, halfway to sobs even before he’d been given anything to cry about.

He knew, from the pattern of marks that he saw in the bathroom mirror afterwards, that his dad had layered stripes from just above his knees to just below his shoulder blades, with a force that spoke of anger but an evenness that attested to dead calm. The welts were perfectly parallel, the edges overlapping. He knew the shape of the damp patch he’d left on the bedspread, from tears he hadn’t been able to hold back, and screams that he’d loosed into the mattress. He knew the shape of the fear he’d felt, that the beating would never end, that he’d be pinned there until the meat had been flayed from his bones. But he couldn’t remember, exactly, the beating itself. 

It seemed unconscionable, as he followed his father in tracking Sammy, that this man had done that to him. It hadn’t happened, despite all of the evidence that it had. It wasn’t until Hell that the sense-memory came back to him: the feeling of being completely at someone’s mercy, knowing that they were going to keep hurting him not because they hated him, or because it gave them pleasure, but because he deserved it. 

It took them ten days to find Sammy, long enough for the bruises on his face to fade. The ones his clothes covered took longer, but Sam was too caught up in his own concerns to notice. Sam had known when he left that he’d pay for his little vacation when they caught up with him. Even though he bitched about how unfair it was that he had to fucking run away from home to get a taste of a normal life, he’d taken it with a measure of indifference: eleven licks, hard and fast and dispassionate. 

Dad had stopped being mad after that, but Dean had still been pissed, had told him so. Sam had shot back that it wasn’t any skin off his nose, that he’d planned it out and done it himself, that he was the one that’d been belted for it. Dean hadn’t been able to burst his bubble, not then, not when the fear of losing him was still so raw. If he’d done his job Sam would never have had a chance to slip away. He deserved what he’d gotten, deserved more. 

*

He was sixteen the first time he found himself wishing that his dad had just hit him instead. 

Dad had left them in some small town in upstate New York while he took care of a rugaru hunt. It had gone long, been more involved than he initially thought. It always was. Even with Dean shorting himself to make sure Sam got enough to eat, they ran out of food money before Dad got back. Not that he’d ever let Sam know. Even years later, the reflex was still there to keep him from knowing how bad things had gotten, to let him just be a stupid kid that didn’t think about shit like that. He’d rather Sam think he was a dumbass than that Dad was a deadbeat. 

Everyone knew you hit one of the big chain grocery stores where the staff wasn’t paid enough to care, only stopped you if you lifted the restricted shit like booze, or the expensive shit like baby formula. But his only option in walking distance was a little mom and pop market. He knew that hunger made a person stupid, desperation even more so, knew that he was making a mistake the moment he set foot in the place.

It went about as well as he should have expected. 

While he waited for the owner to get done telling the sheriff all the ways the youth were taking the country straight to hell and how things were different back in his day he comforted himself with the fact that the old coot probably would have still called the cops if he’d found Dean going through the dumpster out back, that all roads led to this moment. He’d had less than ten bucks worth of merchandise on him when he’d tried to walk out, so he figured there was a good chance the deputy would cut him loose the moment they were out of sight of the store, that he was putting on a show for the cross-grained old bastard that owned the place.

No such luck. 

At the station they booked him, then handed him a phone and told him to call his parents. He could work with that. He phoned the bungalow where they were crashing, cut the call after the first ring, then dialled again. Sure enough, Sam picked up.

“Dean?”

“Hi Mister Poughkeepsie, it’s Dean Winchester,” he said, as wholesome and bright as he could manage.

“Dean, are you in trouble?” 

“Can I talk to my dad? It’s kinda a family emergency.”

“Oh, shit. Oh shit.” Sam breathed deep. “Ok. Ok.” 

It killed him, holding his silence so it looked like he was waiting for his dad to come to the phone. When he figured it had been long enough he said, 

“Hey dad, I’m in a bit of a fix.”

“You’re in trouble, and someone is listening to your phone call?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. Uh. I’m down at the police station.” 

“Something’s got you?” 

“Yeah.”

“Did you find a hunt? Are you hunting something?”

Dean paused on that one. He hadn’t realised that Sam still lived in a world where people were the good guys, the ones you protected. Where the monster under the bed was the only thing you had to be afraid of. 

“Yeah. They’re not gonna cut me loose unless one of my parents comes and gets me.”

“Oh shit. Does that mean I should call Dad?”

He didn’t let himself hesitate.

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“Ok. Ok, I’ll do that right now.”

He wanted to tell Sam that he would be fine, that it wasn’t as bad as all that. But the best he could do was, “I’ll be fine here until you can make it.”

He hung up the phone, then gave the deputy what he hoped was a winning smile. “He’s working a double, won’t be able to make it over here for a while.”

“Huh. Got anyone else you can call, kid?”

“No, it’s just me and him.”

“Well, guess you get to spend some time in a holding cell.”

As he settled down to wait he tried to keep his thoughts on the positives. Sam didn’t seem too badly freaked out. The doors were locked and warded, and he knew enough to refresh the salt lines, keep a weapon close. He’d call Dad, and Dad would either tell him that Dean could handle himself, or he’d drop everything and come running. 

He still figured the cops were just trying to scare him straight, would let him go when they got sick of waiting for his dad to turn up. All he’d tried to lift was bread and peanut butter, for fuck’s sake. They weren’t going to send him to juvie over that. Any other town they would have let him off with a warning, he was sure of it.

And if Dad did turn up at the station… he figured it was even odds whether he’d get a pat on the shoulder and a ‘you can’t win ‘em all,’ or the belt would come off. Dad had been seriously pissed when he had to come bail Dean out after his first attempt breaking and entering a few years back. He’d been more annoyed at the cops than at his son the times Dean had been picked up wandering around at two in the morning, the times when the hunt had put him places that it was suspicious for a teen to be hanging out. It probably came down to how things were going with the rugaru, how well he thought Dean had been following orders. He’d been stealing to feed Sam, which brought it under the heading of parentally condoned activities. But he shouldn’t have gotten himself caught. He shouldn’t have left Sam alone.

When the clock rounded midnight and still no one had come for him, the deputy on duty gave him a long, assessing look, then dialled his phone. 

“Hey Phyllis, it’s Jim. Yeah, I’m gonna need you to open up a file. White male, birth date 01-24-79, name Dean Winchester. We picked him up for shoplifting, but we’ve had him going on fourteen hours now, and no guardian’s shown up.” The man hunched a bit then, dropped his voice, but even so Dean knew he was talking about the bruises they’d seen on his arms, the fact that he was stealing food instead of liquor or smokes, the kind of things a kid with a good home and a rebellious streak would normally steal. This was bad. 

When shift change rolled around, the man gave him another one of those long looks, then said, “Look, kid, I’m gonna have to talk to your dad myself. Just give me the number.”

He wanted to come back with ‘who do you think taught me to shoplift in the first place?’ but he figured that was the fastest way to get a one-way ticket to foster care - or juvie - short of bringing out a tearful confession about how his dad bad touched him and burned him with cigarettes and locked him in closets. So he recited the number and hoped that Sammy was bright enough to play them, assuming he picked up at all. 

Even at that distance, he recognised the growl on the other end of the phone. It turned his guts to water.

Out of all the possible outcomes, he hadn’t expected his dad to tell the cops to let him rot. Neither had the cops, apparently. As they went back and forth about what to do with him, he told himself it was just his dad taking the best option. A kid gets caught stealing staple food, their parent can’t make it to come deal with them for more than 12 hours, that was a situation that pretty much gift-wrapped him for CPS. Sam too, if they did their jobs right. A mouthy punk getting picked up shoplifting stuff he doesn’t need, a fed-up dad tells them they can scare him straight because he can’t do a thing with him, that painted a different picture. 

For a moment, while the cops were bouncing around the idea of sending him to the county jail until arraignment, he let himself really freak out. He’d heard stories about what happened to guys in jail. He knew he was pretty, and even though he could fight he was still on the small side. Grown men, real criminals… he wouldn’t stand a chance.

He should have tried picking the handcuffs, looking for an opening to slip away quietly. That’s probably what Dad wanted him to do. Take the initiative. Get himself out. He’d made this mess, and he was man enough that he should be able to fix it. But when they finally let him out of the holding cell and walked him over to a squad car, the last thing he’d heard was ‘county,’ and it scared him more than his dad ever had. So instead of waiting for an opening, he sucker-punched a cop. 

He was lucky that there weren’t any consequences for that. He’d expected there to be, when he saw Sonny, but the man was all gentleness. 

He would have taken off at the first opportunity, but the farm was out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. If he was going to walk all the way back to the bungalow colony he needed food. Once he’d eaten, the idea of a real bed, after the night spent sitting up on the bench in that holding cell under the fluorescent light, was too sexy to pass up. And then, the next morning, with a full stomach and after a solid night of sleep, he had the wits to start worrying what would happen when he got home. 

It had been less than a year since Flagstaff. He still flinched from raised hands, backed down the moment Dad’s voice rose. When the cops had started talking about sending him to the county jail he would have given almost anything for Dad to turn up, bail him out, drag him home, and kick his ass. But the idea of walking into it — of sneaking out of Sonny’s, walking all the way back to town, going in their front door knowing what was waiting for him — made his stomach turn over, sent fear shivering down his back. He’d fucked up, scared the shit out of Sammy and dragged Dad back from a hunt. He’d gotten people hurt because he couldn’t manage the money, couldn’t keep his brother fed, couldn’t get one over on a small town grocer and some hick sheriff’s deputies. Dad wasn’t going to just let all that slide. And the idea of walking into that without any kind of idea what he was in for made him sick with dread. 

He’d turned up at Sonny’s on a Friday. It was Sunday before he managed to get to a phone, without anyone else around. He keyed in the number for their apartment, let the phone ring once, hung up and rang again so they would know it was him. Maybe Dad was waiting for him to call, to get his orders. At the very least he could gauge the man’s temper, get a read on how much shit he was in. 

No answer. 

He called again, and then again a few hours later. No one picked up. It wasn’t until the next day, when a voice he didn’t recognise answered the phone, that he let himself admit what, by then, he already knew: Dad had moved on and left him behind. 

That didn’t mean that Dean couldn’t still run away, but it changed the game a lot. He didn’t know where they were, for one. Didn’t want to call Bobby or Pastor Jim, or any of the other numbers he knew he’d be able to tap to find Dad, didn’t want to have to explain to them why he’d got separated in the first place. And he didn’t like his odds, a kid on his own trying to track them down, with no money, no weapons, nothing but the clothes on his back. The same things that made him scared of county jail could happen to him on the road easy, probably easier than they could in jail. And he didn’t want to steal from Sonny, not after what he’d done for him. When it came right down to it, he was better staying put. 

Living there hadn’t been half bad. The worries were small and the food was regular. But every night that he lay in the bunk-room, listening to the breathing of the other boys, he couldn’t help thinking about Sam. Wondering where he was sleeping. Whether he was scared without Dean. Whether Dad was taking care of him right. He’d been younger than Sam the first time Dad left him in charge, but Sam was different. He was soft, not in the way that meant weak, but in the way Dean’s bed at the home was soft, the way his favourite shirt was soft. Sam gave back good things when you touched him, in a manner of speaking. He still thought the best of people, saw the best in situations. Dean didn’t want all that softness to be worn down by Dad’s abrasive temper, and he was sure it would if he weren’t there to get between them. 

When Dad turned up, two months later, Dean expected him to say something. About leaving his brother alone, about getting caught stealing, about all the opportunities he’d had to run away that he’d not taken. But that time, he really didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until three or four hunts later that Dean let himself hope that maybe the other shoe wasn’t going to drop. Maybe Dad was going to let this one go. He was an adult, more or less, and he was being allowed to stand on his own feet, to live with the consequences of his own actions. 

Or that was the way he chose to look at it, anyway. 

*

He was nineteen the first time Dad used his fists. 

Sam was fifteen, shooting up, eating them out of house and home. Dad didn’t leave them with food money any more. He handed over a few bills if Dean asked, but he didn’t deal out an allowance for them like he used to. He’d taught Dean to hustle and to pickpocket, and now that he was old enough to work on his own — the actual hunting Dad still took point on, but Dean was allowed to do the investigation, the legwork — Dad expected him to mostly take care of himself. Sometimes Sam stuck with Dad, and Dean only had to worry about keeping one body fed and clothed and out of the rain. But more often than not Sam stuck with him, preferring not to be alone with Dad if he could help it. Dean didn’t blame him, but it did mean that any money he made went half as far. And that, in the end, was what made him decide to diversify his portfolio.

He didn’t turn tricks. It wasn’t that he had any problem with it, philosophically speaking. But getting caught selling his ass… There was no way in hell. If he didn’t die from the embarrassment of it, his dad would straight up kill him. 

Instead, he let his good looks work for him. He’d hook up with a random guy, wait until he was sex-drunk and distracted, then lift his wallet. Keep the cash, use the cards to fuel up, hang on to the ID if he figured he could use it, then drop anything he didn’t want in a federal mailbox on his way out of town. It was less risky than straight-up pickpocketing, came with a good measure of plausable deniability. It wasn’t prostitution; they weren’t paying for the sex. It was opportunistic. And it justified the hooking up, made it feel less transgressive than it did when he was doing it just for fun. 

He wasn’t sure when, or where, he’d learned to pick up dudes. it just happened. He’d lock eyes with a guy across a room, glance away, glance back. That was all it usually took. He didn’t have to be anyone but himself. Not a talent scout, not an FBI agent, just a random drifter in thrift store clothes with nothing but six bucks and a GED to his name. The guys he slept with didn’t care. The guys he slept with were into that. And you didn’t have to be on your game when you were cruising for guys, the way you had to if you wanted to pick up chicks. You could share a beer, shoot the breeze with another dude in that easy, comfortable way. He couldn’t explain it, couldn’t understand how some guys he couldn’t look at without imagining what it would feel like to have their skin under his teeth, their body under his hands, sudden and unbidden and overwhelming. He didn’t know what to do with that feeling, that fascination, and he didn’t want to examine it too closely, either. 

He recognised the irony in how he’d suck a guy off in the bathroom of a dive bar, then an hour later he’d be calling Sam gay for eating a salad. Everything about Sam was gay: the hair, the softness, the puppy-dog eyes. But Dean was the one that got clocked. Not just by the other guys like him, but even people who had no business being able to tell. Hotel clerks, cops, random kids. The less Sam tried, the more manly he seemed. The harder Dean tried to hide it, the quicker everyone he met seemed to pick up on it.

It wasn’t fucking fair.

But anyway. 

They were a day or two ahead of Dad, in a fair-sized town outside Wichita. He’d left Sam at the motel to do some research while he went out to ‘question the locals’ at the nearest bar. Halfway through his first cheap beer he’d gotten talking to a nice guy with big hands and good taste in aftershave. By the time midnight rolled around they were standing close enough that Dean’s lips brushed the shell of the man’s ear when he spoke. It could have just been so he could be heard over the music, but he also had his palm pressed to the front of the guy’s jeans, just out of sight, so he could feel what kind of effect his whispering was having. Whether his suggestion that they take this somewhere else was something the guy was into. It wasn’t subtle if you were the guy, but to anyone else it should have just looked like they were talking. 

Then a hand came down on the collar of Dean’s shirt and dragged him away. 

Both the guy he’d been feeling up and the bartender had something to say about that, but they were cut off by a deep, authoritative voice.

“Easy, gentlemen. He’s my son, and he’s a few years shy of twenty-one.” 

He flushed with shame at having his dad show up to drag him home like he was some kid, even as he felt the fear run like electricity over his skin. He should have been able to play it off, but he didn’t dare.

Dad levelled a look at the bartender. 

“I don’t want to deal with the cops, you don’t want to deal with the Alcoholic Beverage Control. Let me take him home; no harm, no foul. Sound good?” 

He barely waited for the man to nod before he turned and dragged Dean out of the bar. 

They made it only as far as the nearest alley before Dad had him pinned to the brickwork by both shoulders.

“What the hell are you playing at, boy?” he growled.

“Dad, I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t like that!”

“It wasn’t, was it?”

There was a burst of pain in Dean’s right cheekbone, and with it came a spike of adrenaline, a sickening sense of disorientation, a ringing in his ears. 

Oh. Dad had punched him. 

“Let me give you a friendly hint. Wallet’s in the back pocket, dick’s in the front.”

Another quick left cross. He saw it coming this time, rolled with it, but it still hurt. 

He’d thought he was too old for hitting. Sure, he still got the odd pop across the mouth when he pushed things a little too far, and Sam got the back of Dad’s hand pretty regularly — but he picked fights like he planned to medal in it. But this wasn’t Dad giving him a swat because Dean was his kid and he’d fucked up. This was different.

“If I hadn’t turned up, how far would you have taken it?” 

“I wasn’t gonna-“

He was cut off by his dad taking hold of both his shoulders again, shaking him so his teeth rattled.

“Don’t you lie to me. You’ve done this before. How far have you gone?” 

He couldn’t keep the truth off his face.

The next punch caught him square in the solar plexus. He went down, lost in the shock of spasming lungs, thankful that it overwhelmed the shame he felt. There was no way he was getting back up after that. He got his arms up around his head, tried and failed to draw his knees in to protect his belly, then just held still and took it, the rushing in his ears and the struggling rasp of his breath drowning out the sound of his father’s words.

Given the mess his face was in the next morning, of course Sam wanted to know what had happened. He spun a story about coming on to the wrong guy’s girlfriend, grinned and shrugged it off. Dad scowled when he spoke, but didn’t correct him, and for that he was cravenly grateful. He managed to keep the rest of his bruises covered until they had faded to green and yellow, blended with the marks of the hunt, as much because he didn’t want to be reminded of what his dad had done to him as to keep Sam from asking questions. The way he pissed blood for nearly a week after, the way Dad looked at him sometimes, was reminder enough. 

It wasn’t until after Sam went off to Stanford, after he and Dad started hunting separately, that he went back to hooking up with guys. Not often, and never if he thought there was any chance of running into someone who knew him. The first time, not long after they’d all parted ways, was more of a ‘fuck you’ to his dad than anything else; he’d cried a bit during and vomited afterwards, sick on his own self-loathing. He’d gotten better at grifting by then, didn’t need their money, but he always took something anyway: a guitar pick, a bandanna, a ring. If anything, it was the opposite of keeping a souvenire. He’d taken what he wanted from them, so he could forget that they’d ever existed.

He never thought about that beating in the alley. The memory was like a hot stove: a shock of pain every time he brushed against it, his conciousness drawing sharply back. He couldn’t bring himself to examine it, to dig into the implications, the right or wrong of it. He couldn’t bear to touch it. So it stayed, lodged deep inside him like shrapnel, sparking off agony whenever anyone unwittingly touched the scar where it had entered him. 

*

He was older than the earth itself when he turned his fists on his own son. 

He’d known from the moment he saw Sam again, supposedly escaped from the unescapable cage, that something was different. Something was wrong. He’d practically raised the kid, spent his whole life protecting him. He didn’t need to catalogue all of the tiny things — and using Dean as vamp bait wasn’t what you’d call ‘tiny’ by any stretch — to know that something was wrong. But it wasn’t until a goddess told him Sam wasn’t human that he finally let himself believe it. 

It had flowed out of him, in that moment, all of the violence that had flowed into him. Part of it was anger, over the ways Sam had fucked him over since coming back, over Lisa and Ben and whatever the fuck was up with Samuel. And part of it was the fact that maybe this wasn’t Sam, maybe this was a good-old-fasioned monster, and that’s what you did with monsters. But this monster had Sam’s face, and Sam’s smell, and a bigger part of him than he wanted to admit was doing it because of that. Because Sam had gotten himself in this situation, because Dean didn’t know what else to do except take a page out of Dad’s book, handle it the way Dad had handled Dean. So he dished out everything that he’d ever taken. He kept punching until his knuckles spilt and he felt Sam’s nose break under them, until blood spattered them both. Until his brother was unconcious on the floor. 

After he’d wrestled Sam’s body into a chair but before he called Cas he sat there for a moment, looking at him. The hair he’d washed. The hands he’d held. The nose he’d wiped. And, sure, the nose he’d socked more than once when Sam was being a bitch, but nothing like this. Never like this. He knew he had anger, that he had carried it with him as long as he could remember. But he’d never dreamed he’d turn it on Sam. 

Not that this was Sam, strictly speaking. But it looked like Sam, it sounded like Sam, and from what their experience with demon possession had taught them, there was a pretty good chance that Sam was still in there somewhere, seeing and feeling and hearing everything. What did it say about him, that he could do what he’d just done to something that looked exactly like Sam? He knew that he was going to do whatever it took to fix him, no matter what that turned out to be, and that was fine. If Cas took a look under the hood and told him to kill the thing he’d been thinking was his brother he would do it without question, and that was fine too. But what he’d just done… Was this how Dad had felt, in Fort Douglas, and Flagstaff, and when he dragged Dean out of the bar outside Wichita? Had it felt righteous? Because all Dean felt right now was heartsick. 

Sam moaned then, quietly, twitched a bit at the fingertips and eyelids. He was running out of time. He put all of those thoughts away in the dark corner where they lived, along with the memories he couldn’t touch, the questions he didn’t want to ask, the longings he didn’t dare name. Then he closed his eyes, and prayed.


End file.
